I’ll start once again with an image I’m sure many of you have seen.
This with some artistic license is indicative of how a project can end up without a decent specification at the start or a specification from only one persons view.
It also demonstrates the need for a cross discipline team when starting out the innovation stage. More often than not companies place a specification into a design & development department and let them have free reign. Where as a designer this can be liberating to have all of that freedom it can ultimately lead you down a personalised design path.
By getting a cross disciplined team together at the start even down to having the customer represented on the panel, as a designer you will benefit from the combined knowledge & ideas. This will enable you to get through the “bad” ideas sooner by adopting the Fail Often & Fail Quickly approach to the early design stages. This cross discipline panel can not just bring ideas but give real life reasons why certain ideas cannot be done and save a designer from disappearing down the rabbit hole for months.
This is a big shift in mindset for many designers who like to have full creative control of a project, from start to finish, but to really avoid that first image & the image below we all need to act as one team with one goal which is making the customer happy which can only lead to more sales & profit for your companies at the end of the day.
I leave you with this final image, another one all too many designers will empathise with, but stepping back if we had the joined up input at the start we could avoid it (well most of it anyway)
